When a construction company calculates a project’s margin, it normally considers labour, materials, plant hire, supplies, subcontracting and overheads.
It is much harder to assign a value to the hours spent retrieving a document, correcting a record, reconstructing a change, checking a deadline or reorganising a team because necessary information arrived too late.
Construction compliance requirements naturally have a cost: safety, documentation, environmental management, contracts and inspections are part of the company’s work.
The problem, therefore, is not the regulations themselves.
The hidden cost arises when an activity that must be carried out anyway is managed in a fragmented or duplicated way, or only when it becomes urgent.
A request that could take five minutes takes forty. A check that could be scheduled becomes an emergency meeting. A change identified on site reaches the office after part of the cost has already been incurred.
These inefficiencies, often invisible in the estimate, can consume hours and margin during execution.
First distinction: compliance cost versus inefficiency cost
If an inspection is mandatory and takes two hours, those two hours are part of the necessary cost of managing the activity correctly.
If, before the inspection, three other people collectively spend another two hours looking for documents the company had already produced, that time has a different nature.
We can therefore distinguish between:
Necessary cost → activity required to manage the compliance obligation correctly.
Avoidable organisational cost → searching, duplication, waiting, resending, corrections and reconstruction caused by how information is managed.
A company can take action on the second group without lowering its level of control.
1. Searching for a document we already have
The document exists.
It was sent months earlier, but no one remembers whether it is in the technician’s email, the shared folder, the site chat or the administration computer.
At that point, a very common chain begins:
phone call → search → request to resend → version check → new sharing.
The cost is not the document.
It is the number of people who have to interrupt their work to find it.
The situation gets worse when multiple versions of the same file exist.
To reduce this cost, you need at least:
- an official source for the project;
- understandable categories;
- identifiable revisions;
- permissions consistent with roles;
- clear responsibility for updates.
We explored this issue further in the guide to managing documents and responsibilities on site.
2. Managing safety only when something is about to start
An activity is scheduled for Monday.
On Friday afternoon, someone checks the documentation, discovers that information is missing, and a rush begins among the contractor, technician, consultant and person in charge.
The organisational cost does not result from the existence of the obligation.
It results from the check taking place too close to the time of execution.
In Italy, the general reference remains D.Lgs. 81/2008.
On its institutional page updated on 22 September 2026, the Ministry of Labour lists, among an employer’s obligations, risk assessment, training and instruction, PPE, health surveillance where required, supervision and other organisational activities.
Software does not replace any of these responsibilities.
It can, however, help a company avoid having to search for necessary documents and information only at the last minute.
3. Co-ordinating every new company as if it were the first time
When a new subcontractor joins the project, a new email chain often begins.
Who is the contact? Which documents are needed? Where should they be uploaded? Who must check them? What information must the team receive?
If these questions are resolved from scratch every time, the company repeatedly pays the same administrative cost.
A simple onboarding procedure should define in advance:
- contacts;
- required documents;
- official channel;
- access;
- operational roles;
- how changes are communicated.
The savings do not come from skipping checks.
They come from not having to reinvent the process every time a different company joins the project.
4. Waste and RENTRI: when a regulatory change also becomes an operational change
2026 provides a very concrete example of how a regulatory update can change established administrative procedures.
The RENTRI – National Electronic Register for Waste Traceability has progressively introduced new digital workflows for managing traceability-related obligations.
The Directorial Decree No. 210 of 31 July 2026 updated the instructions for completing the chronological loading and unloading register and the waste identification form.
When a workflow like this changes, the business cost is not merely “completing a new form”.
Procedures, responsibilities, internal training and the way information is collected must all be updated.
Dealing with everything only when the first need arises inevitably increases the cost of the transition.
5. Price revision: having a right to a mechanism does not mean you can manage it without data
In public works, 2026 introduced an important development regarding price revision.
Since April 2026, ISTAT has published twenty monthly cost indices for Homogeneous Work Categories – TOL, used within the framework established by Article 60 of the Public Contracts Code.
The indices were adopted by Directorial Decree of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport No. 743 of 30 March 2026.
For a contractor, the operating principle is important beyond the specific regulatory mechanism.
If a work item, supply or change cannot be reconstructed with sufficient precision, any subsequent financial analysis also becomes more difficult.
This topic is directly connected to cost, estimate and budget control.
6. A site change that reaches the budget late
A work item changes.
The team proceeds because, operationally, it is the simplest choice.
The financial information, however, is updated days or weeks later.
By then, materials and hours have already been consumed.
For every significant change, it should be possible to reconstruct at least:
- what changed;
- who requested the change;
- when;
- which work items are affected;
- possible impact on costs and programme;
- any approval process required by the contract.
It is not necessary to turn every minor change into a bureaucratic procedure.
But a financially significant change should not appear for the first time in the final account.
7. Entering the same information four times
The person in charge writes down information on paper.
Later, they send it by message.
The office enters it into Excel.
Finally, it is entered into the management system.
Each individual step takes only a few minutes.
Multiplied across dozens of pieces of information and several projects, it becomes a significant process.
Moreover, every rewrite introduces the possibility of:
- error;
- omission;
- delay;
- inconsistency between systems.
One of the most useful questions during digitisation is therefore:
“How many times are we manually entering the same data?”
What are these hours really worth?
I would not use a standard percentage valid for every company.
The most credible approach is to measure your own process.
For two to four weeks, you can record the main inefficiencies:
- document searches;
- resending;
- corrections;
- meetings organised to reconstruct information;
- waiting caused by missing information;
- manual data re-entry;
- trips made solely to exchange documents.
A cautious formula may be:
Inefficiency cost = hours spent × company cost of the people involved
You can add costs for vehicles, idle equipment, travel or other directly measurable consequences when they are actually incurred.
If an interruption involves four people, you should not measure only the duration of the problem.
You must consider the total time absorbed by all four people.
2026 increases the cost of being disorganised
The Italian framework continues to evolve.
In addition to updates on RENTRI and price revision, in June 2026 the Ministerial Decree No. 78 of 22 June 2026 was adopted. It identifies violations relating to labour and health and safety that are relevant to access to certain regulatory and contribution benefits.
The point is not to turn every company into an in-house law firm.
It is exactly the opposite.
The more complex the framework becomes, the more important it is to separate regulatory interpretation—which belongs to qualified professionals—from the day-to-day organisation of information, which the company can improve directly.
What to do tomorrow morning
I would not start by immediately buying new software.
I would choose one project and do this exercise.
1. List recurring compliance obligations
Not every existing rule. Only the activities that actually generate work on that project.
2. Identify who owns the information
Person in charge, administration, technician, consultant, supplier or another company.
3. Count the steps
How many emails, phone calls, copies and re-entries are needed?
4. Measure the time
For at least two weeks, without trying to improve the data yet.
5. Eliminate one duplication
Just one.
For example, establish an official source for one document category or prevent the same information from being rewritten in three different files.
The most useful KPIs
- average time needed to find a document;
- number of resend requests;
- number of data items entered manually more than once;
- hours spent reconstructing information;
- deadlines handled as emergencies;
- operational changes not yet valued;
- trips made solely to exchange documents;
- average time between a site event and the office update.
These indicators do not say whether the company complies with the regulations.
They show how much work is absorbed by the way the company manages the information needed for its operations.
Where Edil-Up can help
Edil-Up does not replace consultants, professionals, safety personnel or checks required by the regulations.
Its role is organisational.
As a Construction Operating System, Edil-Up is developed to reduce fragmentation among information belonging to the same project.
Within project management, a company can organise:
- projects and phases;
- collaborators;
- roles and permissions;
- documents;
- communications;
- attendance;
- basic financial information.
The mobile app also makes it possible to take part of this workflow on site.
The advantage is not “automating regulations”.
It is enabling authorised people to find information the company already has more easily and reducing the number of environments in which they have to search for it.
To compare different tools, you can also consult the guide to construction site management software.
Checklist: where are your hours disappearing?
- Do we often request documents we had already received?
- Are deadlines handled sufficiently far in advance?
- Does every new company joining the project generate completely new procedures?
- Is the same data written into multiple systems?
- Do changes quickly reach the people who control costs?
- Do the site and office use the same source?
- Do we measure the time spent searching and reconstructing information?
- Can we distinguish a necessary cost from an organisational inefficiency?
Updated official sources
- Normattiva — D.Lgs. 81/2008 , the general Italian reference for occupational health and safety.
- Ministry of Labour — Employer obligations regarding health and safety , institutional page updated on 22 September 2026.
- RENTRI — 2026 update to the chronological register and FIR , Directorial Decree No. 210 of 31 July 2026.
- ISTAT — Cost indices for Homogeneous Work Categories, 2026 , new TOL indices for price revision in public works contracts.
- Ministry of Labour — Ministerial Decree No. 78 of 22 June 2026 , concerning violations relating to labour and health and safety relevant to certain regulatory and contribution benefits.
Conclusion: compliance costs money; disorder costs twice as much
A construction company cannot eliminate the compliance obligations that apply to it.
It can, however, avoid paying multiple times to manage the same information.
The first time is when it produces it.
The second is when it has to find, resend, correct or reconstruct it.
This second part often does not appear in the estimate and gradually absorbs operational time.
You do not need generic percentages to identify it.
You need to observe a real project, measure interruptions and understand which steps can be simplified without reducing control, safety or compliance.
Regulations are a constraint to respect. The chaos with which we choose to manage them is not.
Edil-Up Team
